She waited as the crowd milled, the reapers murmuring to one another in confusion, but now Benny could hear a note of hope in their sounds.
“Where once the family of the reapers was weak, now we are strong,” said Mother Rose. “Where once we were scattered like sheep, now we are part of a great family. A community of saints for whom the heavens themselves are ours to sow.”
There were definite frowns on many of the faces, but Mother Rose’s beatific smile never wavered.
“What’s she doing?” asked Nix.
Benny shook his head.
“You all know that the last of Carter’s heretics are in these woods,” said Mother Rose. “What most of you do not know is that she who was my daughter intends to lead them to Sanctuary.”
The collected reapers gasped in horror.
“Saint John and Brother Peter are hunting them now,” continued Mother Rose. “It is their desire that every one of the heretics be sent into the darkness.”
A few of the reapers gave rousing shouts of approval, but Mother Rose looked at them with unblinking eyes until they fell silent. The reapers shuffled like naughty schoolboys.
“Saint John, beloved of Thanatos—”
“Praise be to his darkness.”
“—wants to find and destroy Sanctuary. He wants to open red mouths in the flesh of everyone there. He wants to end the heartbeat of all heresy.”
No one cheered, though it seemed clear to Benny that many of them agreed with what Saint John wanted to do. Confusion and doubt was written on every face except that of Mother Rose and the giant with the hammer.
“But,” said Mother Rose, her voice becoming quieter, almost a whisper, “this is not what our god wants.”
No one even blinked. They stared, stock-still.
“I have had a vision, my beloved children. In a sacred trance, Lord Thanatos himself spoke to me.”
“Oh brother,” growled Nix. “Do you believe this crap?”
“They seem to,” said Benny.
It was true; many of the reapers touched their hands to the angel designs on their chests.
“The lord of the darkness has tested us so many times and in so many ways. Those of you who have been with the Night Church since Wichita remember how many tests have been put before us.”
Several heads nodded.
“There have been failures and setbacks and defeats . . . and yet each time, no matter how devastating each new calamity appeared, we found the holy path through the fire and the smoke. We passed each test, no matter how difficult. We did this. Each of us, serving the will of our god even when God has made the path uncertain and the way forward choked with thorns and fog.”
More heads nodded now.
“And what has this done? All along the way we have seen many of our fellows fall, and while their spirits have gone on into the darkness we have stayed behind, weeping and tearing at our garments, crying out, Why? Why them and not us? Why has the lord of the night punished us so many times when others whose will and whose faith were not as strong as ours were allowed to go into the sacred darkness?”
“Tell us why, Mother!” cried out one of the reapers. It was a thin man with a beaky nose. He fell to his knees and clapped his hands together. “Tell us, please!”
Another reaper dropped to her knees. “What sins have we committed that bar our way to paradise?”
Nix and Benny looked at each other.
“Is it me, or did that look planned?” asked Nix.
“Yeah,” agreed Benny, “I think she seeded the crowd like Mr. Hopewell does when he’s running the Sunday auction.”
Mother Rose stepped forward and touched the bowed head of the kneeling woman.
“Sins, my daughter?” she said. “Did I say that you have sinned?”
She paused a beat and looked at the others.
“Did I say that any of you have sinned?” She drew the kneeling woman to her feet and kissed her on both cheeks. “No, my beloved, we have all passed through that fire together, and in its heat we have been purified.”
The last word hung in the air like the clear note of a church bell. Even Benny felt a chill.
“Each of us here in this sacred place has passed through the fire many times. Each of us has stayed true even when we thought that our god had withdrawn his grace from us. Each of us has proven our faith beyond all doubt. And thus, the lord of the darkness has revealed to me that this—all of this, our struggles, our doubts, our pain, our longing, our faith—has made us the chosen of Thanatos.”
There was another beat.
“Henceforth we will rise to be worthy of that choice. We will sing out in joy for the glory of God’s grace. We will no longer fear life and flee like sheep into the darkness of the grave.” Mother Rose raised her arms in triumph. “We have been reapers at work in the fields of the Lord. This task we have done well and faithfully. The fields are clear of vermin and pests. They are clean, and they welcome us to put down our tools of reaping and set about our new work.”
The woman who had been kissed cried out, “What is our purpose, Mother Rose, beloved of Thanatos?”
Mother Rose turned so that her upraised hands indicated everything. Not just this field, Benny knew . . . but everything.
“The chosen will go out into the world and reclaim it.”
Although Benny didn’t really understand the nature of this church, he thought he had the gist of it. It felt like a weird slant on something Charlie Pink-eye used to say: Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.
Except that now this woman seemed to be changing the rules.
“Is she talking about double-crossing Saint John?” asked Nix, once more proving that she was reading his thoughts.
“I think so.”
“Better her than me,” said Nix. “That guy freaked me out.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not having fuzzy puppy love about Mother Nut Job down there.”
“How many sides are there in this fight? I thought it was Eve’s family against these reapers.”
Benny nodded. “Sorry to make a bad joke, but from what we just heard, I think there’s trouble in paradise.”
“Ugh.” Nix looked around the cockpit. “Whose side do you think they were on?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. The good guys’ side, I hope.”
“Okay, but who are the good guys? Eve’s dad tried to shoot us.”
“Wait, something’s happening,” Benny said.
Down in the clearing, the reapers were arguing among themselves. However, one by one they broke from the group and knelt before Mother Rose.
“Praise be to the mother of us all,” yelled one man. “Praise be to the mother of the chosen!”
Suddenly they were all kneeling and crying out, repeating those words like a chant as Mother Rose stood above them, arms up and out, drinking in their cries. The reapers crawled forward to kiss the bloodred streamers tied to Mother Rose’s clothes. Benny saw, however, that one of the reapers hesitated longer than the others before joining the group. He was a barrel-chested Latino with twin knives thrust through his belt. And Benny saw Mother Rose flick a covert glance to the giant and then to that reaper.
“He’s a dead man,” said Nix before Benny could say it. “He’s not buying any of this, and he’s freaking dead.”
“Sucks to be him,” agreed Benny.
As they watched, the gathering broke up. Mother Rose said a few words to each of them, mostly telling them to spread the word to the other reapers. At no point did she tell them to keep Saint John out of the loop, but it was the impression Benny got.
The man who had been the first to drop to his knees lingered for a moment, as did a few others, and Benny noted that these reapers were the ones who had first “seen the light.” It confirmed his suspicions that they were plants in the gathering, just like the friends of Mr. Hopewell who yelled out the first bids and kept driving up the sale price. These people clustered around Mother Rose and received additional instructions that Benny a
nd Nix could not hear. When Mother Rose nodded in the direction the Latino man had taken, one of the reapers smiled, nodded, and hurried silently into the woods to follow.
Afterward, Mother Rose and the giant stood in silence until the sounds of the quads and the shouts of the “chosen” faded into silence.
The big man shook his head and laughed with a rumble from deep in his chest.
“Well, Rosie,” he said, “you really did it now. There’s no coming back from this.”
“I don’t intend to come back, Alexi,” she said with cold amusement. “It’s all about moving forward. Besides, if we waited any longer, Saint John might actually destroy Sanctuary. And we can’t have that, can we?”
“No, ma’am. But . . . Saint John’s going to be pissed. He has his heart set on seeing that place burn.”
“He can take it up with God. It’s his own fault. He made me the head of this crazy church. Besides,” she said with a smile, “I had a holy vision.”
They laughed and began to walk away.
Then the woman did something that absolutely mystified Nix and Benny while at the same time freezing the blood in their veins. Mother Rose turned, raised her fingers to her lips, and blew a kiss into the air.
Directly toward the plane.
Then she and the giant smiled at each other. They turned away and walked without haste into the forest.
Half a minute later another reaper appeared. He stepped out of a pocket of dense shadows where no one had apparently noticed him. He was a tough, unsmiling young man with intense dark eyes. He walked to the spot where Mother Rose and Brother Alexi had stood. Even from all the way up in the plane, Benny could see the muscles bunch at the corners of his jaw and the rigid lines of muscle definition that stood out on his arms as he clenched his fists. Benny wasn’t sure if he had ever seen anyone that totally and utterly furious.
The man spat on the ground where Mother Rose had stood, then turned and melted like the specter of murder into the forest.
Benny and Nix stared for a long time at the empty clearing.
“What the hell was that all about?” breathed Nix.
Benny shook his head. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
58
BEFORE THEY SET OUT TO FIND THE OTHERS, JOE WENT OVER THE FUNCTIONS of the quad with Lilah. She didn’t ask why. It was practical information shared from one fighter to another. It was what Tom would have done.
“This thing will go all day long without much fuel,” he explained. “Runs on ethanol, and the reapers had a tanker of the stuff.”
“Had?”
“I, um, borrowed it from them,” he explained. “Got it hid in an arroyo a few miles from here. When we find your friends, we’ll see about borrowing a few more quads. Beats the heck out of walking everywhere.”
“How come these machines work? I thought the EMPs . . . ?”
“They blew out a lot of stuff, but not everything. I’ve been to places where people have cars—well, had cars. Gasoline wasn’t made to last more than a year or two, and by now it’s all bad. Only things still running are vehicles that used to run on ethanol. There are plenty of cornfields left. Saw a couple of junkers powered by hand-crank generators, solar panels, and even a few with little mini wind turbines. They only get up to about ten miles an hour, but that still beats walking.”
Lilah drove the machine around the big boulders a few times while Joe watched, nodding his approval. Grimm gave a single deep bark to show that he, too, was impressed.
Joe waved her to a stop and switched off the machine. “Okay, you’re good to go, and your bandages aren’t leaking, so that’s good too. I won’t ask if you feel fit enough to pull a trigger. Already know that answer.”
She nodded. “I don’t want to have to fight these people,” she said. “I want to find my friends and continue on our way.”
“Yeah, about that,” Joe said. “You never really told me why four teenagers are way the heck out in the Ruin. It’s not the place for a class trip.”
Lilah considered whether to tell him. She couldn’t see how the information could be used to hurt her or the others. So she told Joe about the jet. And about the plane she’d seen on the plateau.
“Hold on, hold on,” said Joe, suddenly excited. “You saw the transport?”
“What?”
“Big C-130J Super Hercules. Prop job, not a jet. You saw that plane somewhere out here?”
“I saw the jet and—”
Joe cut her off and explained the difference between a jumbo jet and a propeller-driven military transport plane. When he described the latter, she began nodding.
“Yes, that is what I found. It was on the plateau right by the cliff I fell off of. Where we fought the pigs.”
“Did you see any people? Pilots, crew? They’d be in uniforms. . . . ”
“There were three zoms there, hung up on posts.” She described the uniforms.
“Flight crew. Damn it. I knew those guys.” Joe made a pained face. “We’ve been looking for that plane for over a year. Nobody thought it was this close, though. With all the reapers around here, it’s probably been stripped clean. And that’s a real shame. Dr. Monica McReady was aboard that plane. Losing her was a damn hard setback.”
“Setback for whom?”
Joe said, “The human race. She was one of the best epidemiologists we had. One of only a handful who made it through First Night and the plague years. She was worth more than you and me and any five thousand people you can name, and that’s no joke.” He paused. “I guess we were all hoping she was alive somewhere. We kept expecting her to come banging on the door one of these days. I’ve got rangers out everywhere looking for her. The work she was doing . . . I can’t begin to tell you how important it is.”
“Try,” she said frankly.
Joe laughed. “Doc McReady set up the first lab during the outbreak and later moved it to North Carolina, which is where people are trying to build a new America. Lots of people there now, and they even have the lights back on. Later, after we got some reports of possible mutations to the plague in Oregon, Washington, and southern Canada, McReady took a field team up to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which is a few miles southwest of Tacoma. They had to clean up the base first, since everyone was zommed out. McReady established a research camp up there that she called Hope One. Sixty people—scientists, support staff, and a small platoon to guard them. And it was up there that McReady figured out what caused the plague.”
“People think it was radiation from a—”
“Oh, please. No one really believes that.”
“A virus, then?”
“Yes . . . and no. McReady discovered that it’s actually a combination of several diseases and a few nasty little parasites, all of them working together like a microscopic terrorist cabal. Most people call it the Gray Plague, but the official designation is Reaper, and, yes, that’s where the reapers got their name. Bunch of freaks. Anyway, the Reaper Plague is genuine mad science, and everyone’s pretty sure that Mother Nature did not snort this out because she was feeling cranky.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that someone made this thing,” said Joe, “and somehow it got out of the lab. Or maybe it was deliberately released. No one knows that part, and we probably never will. Whoever launched it is probably dead or shuffling around as a walker. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that McReady’s last report indicated that she was on the verge of some major breakthrough. The problem is that we don’t know what that breakthrough was or even could be, because no one down here has a clue. The only hint we have is a cryptic reference in her last report of the plan to field-test a counter-plague.”
“A counter-plague . . . ? You mean a disease that would stop the Reaper Plague?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Problem is, McReady sent a distress call from Hope One, saying that the walker activity was spiking. They sent the C-130 up to evac her, the staff, and all the research notes. When the plane never showed, I s
ent a team of my rangers up. They found Hope One deserted. No staff, no research, so we know that the transport plane at least accomplished the evacuation, but no one ever saw that plane. There were a couple of places where the C-130 could have made an emergency landing, so the decision was made to send a heavy transport to do flyovers of the route. We hoped they’d find the plane down on some airfield and McReady’s people waiting for a new ride. The bird they sent to look was a mother of a C-5 Galaxy, and my guess is that’s the jet your friends saw. The timing would be about right. It did a zigzag search, looking for any sign of McReady’s plane, but they never found it. And it turns out the darn thing is right here! Made it almost all the way home. Holy crap.”
Lilah stared at him. “You know about the jet? You know what it is? Where it is?”
“Sure. Been on it half a dozen times.”
Lilah felt suddenly strange, as if she had stepped out of the real world and into a dream. When she’d seen the crashed plane, she thought that the whole purpose of their journey into the Ruin had come to a dead end. She was sure that the knowledge of its destruction would devastate Nix and Benny. Chong, she knew, didn’t really care one way or the other; he was along because he was in love with her.
Now . . . Nix would be so happy.
Joe interrupted her thoughts. “You said that the flight crew was zommed out and hung on posts? Anything else around them? Incense bowls, bunches of flowers, anything like that?”
“Yes. And signs around their necks saying that they were sinners.”
“Reapers,” growled Joe. Grimm must have recognized the word, because he gave his own low growl, full of menace and promise.
“These reapers . . . will you please tell me who they are?”
“We don’t have time to go into the whole history of the reapers,” said Joe. “The short version is this. Prior to First Night, Saint John was what the police used to call a serial killer. He was a psychopathic mass murderer, and one of almost legendary status. There were books and movies made about him. No real surprise that he survived the Reaper Plague. About ten years ago, Saint John showed up at a settlement north of Topeka. Set himself up as a kind of preacher, talking about how man did not need to suffer, how there was an end to pain, yada, yada. Long story short, at first his message got no traction because people were still busy surviving the end of everything. They were in full-blown survival mode, and nobody wanted to hear about just giving up and giving in.” He removed the magazine from his gun, checked that it was fully loaded, and slapped it back into place. “But as time went on, things got worse out there.”